Posted on 11/18/2004 7:04:28 AM PST by .cnI redruM
Microsoft founder and chairman gets 4 million e-mails a day, making him world's most spammed person.
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - E-mail users inundated with unsolicited "spam" messages have reason to hope Microsoft Corp. will develop better tools for tackling the problem: Bill Gates is suffering more than anyone.
Gates, Microsoft's chairman, gets 4 million e-mails a day and is probably the most "spammed" person in the world, his Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
For a bazillion dollars I'd take 4 million spams a day.
Baked beans are off.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Gates could stop all that spam if he just used Linux and the TMDA anti-spam system.
Please send comments to:
bill.gates@microsoft.com
Half are for ED products and the other half Nigerian get rich quick schemes.
bttt
This made me laugh.
Yea, but he can afford an assistant to help read them all.
Or, alternatively, he could save time installing a half-baked OS simply by using a different email for all of his serious correspondance--something he most likely already does. I can't imagine him using his official, public email address to conduct corporate business and send memos.
for half a bazillion dollars, I'd take 8 million spams a day!
By the way, if you want to stop Spam and you run a Windows system, get the free Thunderbird mail client from mozilla.org and use the built-in junk button and the filters to train it to spot spam and get rid of it. After a short while you get virtually no spam at all.
Plus it's a great, free email client. There's versions for other OS available as well.
Breaded spam is wonderful. Or, as it is called where I'm from.....pannayed spam.
( "Pannayed" is the phonetic spelling. I don't know the actual spelling since it is a Cajun French abominative word. )
Wonder why I don't get Spam..oh thats right I have a Mac and I use Mail which has one of the best spam filters out there.
Hate to break the news to ya, but Gates is already running a half-baked OS. It's called Windows.
simply by using a different email for all of his serious correspondance
In my world, people don't solve problems by running away from them.
I love how the can says "Serving Suggestion."
What!?! You mean it doesn't come out of the can with cloves and parsley.
It seems there's a mail standard that says, if an error occurs, the sender is supposed to re-try again later. Most of the hijacked servers that send out spam do not follow this standard.
So, if I get mail from somebody on my whitelist, it's sent thru immediately.
If I get mail from somebody on my blacklist, it's rejected (I never see it).
If I get mail from somebody not on either list, it's reported as an error to the sender. If the sender follows the standard, it's re-sent withing a couple of hours (usually a few minutes), and it makes it thru to me. (this is the gray list).
This has cut down my spam from 30+ per day to about 3 per week.
A Monty Python skit comes to mind.
And I'd take a half a bazillion spams a day for 8 million dollars!:)
And you can bet Gates has at least ONE internet ID that you
and I will NEVER see! "Let the little guys THINK they're getting through to me. My hired alter-egos answer those messages they deem worthy of an answer.
I chose to go with TMDA since it uses both whitelists and blacklists. I first installed it back in March of this year (along with the mfcheck patch for Qmail). Since that time, only 3 spam have landed in my inbox in the past 8 months. I used to see at least 200 a day.
Me, I'm having spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, bacon, eggs, and spam.
Should have used special service, which I use for all my lawsuits.
Can I get some Viking Kitties singing...
"SPAM! (tm) SPAM! (tm) SPAM! (tm) SPAM! (tm) SPAM! (tm) SPAM! (tm) SPAM! (tm) SPAM! (tm)"
Maybe it's just an interface thing, but the junk mail button is already on the toolbar in Thunderbird. Since using Thunderbird, I have since added the "Junk Mail" button to my Outlook (which I still use for some email accounts) toolbar. But, even when you do this, you have to go through "Organize" and all that crap. Thunderbird is just so much easier.
And, as I have posted on some other threads, I still have an XP box (for business stuff), but I do all my emailing and browsing with Thunderbird and Firefox, respectively. I'm still learning Linux. I installed Fedora Linux installed on a spare box I had (1Gz, 256MB, 10GB HD...nothing fancy) and it runs like a charm, though I'm going to upgrade the memory and the video card). I use my XP box for my accounting stuff for my business, web design (with Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Fireworks, etc...Macromedia doesn't have Linux versions of this software), some business-critical Access databases, and some other stuff.
I still like to use MS Office, as I have an MOS certification. I like OpenOffice's features (especially the one-click and FREE PDF creation). But, I'm just really getting used to the differences in where stuff is. Put it this way, I can create a document or spreadsheet a lot faster in MS Office than I can in OpenOffice. But, that has more to do with familiarity with MS Office than anything else.
<Shrill Voice>But I don't like Spam!
Kernel? Winderz 9x has a kernel? Hah! Ah ha ha ha ha ha! Sorry, I'll regain my composure in a minute. Ah ha ha ha ha ha!
2000 and XP are excellent...
In which universe? You really ought to try stand-up. You're a natural.
Like a toothace?
I stopped using mail clients a long time ago.
Yahoo Mail has a great spam filtering system, you might see one or two spams per week in your Inbox. The identified spam goes to what they call the Bulk Mail folder, which you can review and purge every week or two.
Lots of other mail controls, the best is Address Guard which lets you create email alias addresses which are tied to your account. If someone starts spamming your alias, you just delete it and you'll never see that spammer again.
A bit better than that, at least XP doesn't crash. Much.
Tell that to the poor souls who auto-downloaded and installed SP2 on XP. Some security update. It made the OS so "secure" that even authorized users couldn't use it.
My favorite part is where it lists the ingredients and the first two are pork and ham. Isn't ham pork????
Bingo!
And in addition to the "private" account that's maintained by underlings, who would ever believe that Gates hasn't figured out that he can have a truly secret email address? You know, something like richgeek@HotMail.com?
We can start there. Calling them operating systems is pretty generous, don't you think? Program facilitator? Sure. Application launcher. Of course. Virus propagation mechanism. You betcha. Any similarity between Windows and an operating system is purely unintentional and coincidental.
Unix is an operating system. VMS is an operating system. Heck, even OS-X is an operating system. Windows wanted to be one, but it failed.
Windows memory management system is neither a system nor management. Even a freshman CS student knows better than to allow application space code cause the system to lose track of a resource. Allowing a user space application to exhaust enough system resources that it causes the system to hang or crash is not exactly a hallmark of a decent operating system. Neither is giving unfettered access to the system primitives via the network. Don't buy Microsoft's male bovine offal about Windoze being the premiere target for virii simply because it is the most widely used desktop. It is mostly because it is just so easy. Most of the virii being spread around these days were created by High School kids in their spare time. Windows networking is a hacked up kludge that sits as an afterthought to the system's operating mechanisms. Internet users still have to tiptoe around the NetBIOS and NetBEUI primitives that made up the sorry excuse for a network stack in Windows 3.11. Windows multi-processing and multithreading are absolute jokes. The fact that Outlook or IE can choke on something and cause the entire system to freeze is a good indicator that the Windows multitasking mechanisms are just a tad on the weak side. There's more, but that should suffice for now.
Windows is a wonderful system if you are going to balance your checkbook or play Star Craft. For serious use, you need to move to an actual computer operating system.
Yeah! Sign me up. I'll take 4 million spams a day for even a measly $1 billion!
Linux is the greatest thing since sliced bread for those of us in geekdom. However, for the masses, as you say, it has a long way to go. For starters, desktop users are going to have to have something better than X. The Xorg fork from XFree86 shows promise, but right now it is mostly just getting on its feet.
I will give Microsoft one thing, they vastly improved the windowed desktop system. Sadly, they layered it over mediocre crap, which accounts for the fact that it is all style and no substance. Too bad they take such a proprietary stance. If they opened up their architecture (if one could call it that), there is a massive user community out there to whip it into shape. Better yet, they could go the way Apple did and begin to integrate in tried-and-true open source operating system mechanisms. That way they could leverage the existing open source community to improve their product.
Well, I consider myself a geek, just one who's more interested in the hardware side than the software. I don't know how to program, though I'm in the first of three Java classes for my CIS major. I can see why people like Linux, but it really just bothers me when it's pushed forward as something that's ready for Joe User and his grandparents--it isn't. It might be in a couple of years, but then Longhorn will come along and steal whatever ripples Linux could generate on the "hey, we're finally ready for average user" front.
I really am looking forward to the day when Linux becomes a true alternative, though. If nothing else, it will turn the heat up under Microsoft, resulting in a better Windows, which can only be a good thing.
I can't do that from a web-based email service.
Thunderbird is very easy-to-use, powerful, and a lot better (IMHO) than using web-based email.
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